Month: October 2013

My guess would be: the death of conservatism. Except that that
probably happened in the 1950s, and the sixties were a delayed reaction
to the fact that progressivism no longer had any organised opposition.

The familiar neoreactionary story is that progressives have long had
the upper hand, certainly since the death of Queen Anne in England,
and from the very beginning in the American colonies. Modern leftism
is simply descended from the whigs.

However, though they were dominant throughout the period 1714 – 1960,
they were never entirely unchallenged. There were still Tories in
positions of influence who maintained a coherent traditionalist
political philosophy, and who (in the later period) accomodated with
the age of democracy without ever accepting its assumptions.

That political force was dying in England by 1945. It was routed and
destroyed by 1957. After two hundred years of advance by overcoming
conservative opposition, progressivism was left completely
unconstrained. Scattered discontents remained, but, without a living
conservative movement or philosophy to draw from, they were not able
to make arguments that would satisfy anyone.

Progressives responded by driving out potential rebels — first from
academia, always a centre of progressivism but soon owned by them
exclusively, and then from organised religion.

What we think of as “the sixties” was the gradual realisation by
progressives that they could get away with anything. Every door they
pushed on swung open, and there was a decade of exuberant pillage.

The end came as they gradually adapted to the fact that they were now
the establishment, and needed to produce some measure of moderation
from within. They started to address their contradictions among
themselves: many of today’s basic political and cultural assumptions
were decided somewhat arbitrarily in that 1970s settlement. (That, for
instance, is where paedophiles failed to make the cut as a protected
victim group). The recessions of the 1970s injected a note of realism
into economic policy, and the enfeebled Conservative Party reenergised
itelf, but basing its new opposing philosophy on classical liberalism
rather than conservatism.

It was hard for me to understand the process, because, being born
after the sixties, an actual conservative movement is something I have
never seen. It was on its last legs in the first half of the century,
but it really existed. Thisbiography of Anthony Eden
gives some clues as to what it looked like: patrician, honourable,
suspicious of America, and doomed. There were presumably others like
Eden, but today there are none.

This has obviously been a very anglocentric account. I would guess
that the story for France would be fairly similar, though I don’t
know, but that America was a bit different. The outcome seems to have
been much the same in all three.

Last week, I described theUS Government Shutdown
as a breakdown of the pretence of separation of powers — a seizure by
the president, with the support of the Cathedral, of the powers that
were theoretically supposed to be reserved to the legislature.

Then, in the following post, I claimed that the separation of powers
between the executive and the legislature isthe worst idea of the world.

So, if Obama is grabbing absolute power for himself, like Charles I
did… am I not a supporter of Charles I? Should I not be raising the
standard and the cry, “God Save King Barack”?

Up to a point. There are two, related, differences between King B and
King C. One is that Charles was open about what he was doing. He
didn’t resort to procedural fiddles, he said he was King by divine
right and was entitled to raise taxes without the say-so of any
parliament. Maybe some of his historical justifications were not quite
honest, but he was fighting not just for the practice of autocratic
rule, but for the principle of autocratic rule. The second is that he
actually was the rightful King of his people. (As an aside, I must
recommendthe Address to the Russian People
by Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, an excellently well-reasoned defence
of monarchy). There are relatively few people in America who believe
in the idea of monarchy, and I suspect that approximately none of them
would recognise Obama as King.

Remember that Charles I lost. It would have been better if
he had won, but since he didn’t, it would possibly have been better if
he had been less ambitious, and laid the foundations for a later
consolidation of royal power. If Obama could command with Royal
authority, that might be OK, but he can’t, so that’s that.

What next, then? Over the twentieth century, American democracy
provided government that was, by the standards of its time, better
than average. True, by historical standards it was disastrous, but as
the twentieth century goes, it functioned relatively well. Like any
functioning democracy, it relies on two things: the people believing
they are in charge, and the people not really being in charge.

As I explained, the root of the current troubles is that from 2008
onwards, the illusion of the voters actually having control has been
grievously damaged, and the result of that damage has been the Tea
Party. The pieces in Salon that @Outsideness describes asreally going over the edge
come over as perfectly reasonable if you take the basic assumption
that the Cathedral has a right to rule unimpeded by mid-continent
know-nothings.

“Even if these organizations lost their funding from Wall Street or
the Chamber of Commerce, they could rely on donations from the Tea
Party base, the vast mass of conservative voters and activists
throughout the country who don’t share a scintilla of big business’s
fondness for the status quo.” —Elias Isquith

As much as such a sentiment, from a soi-disant “democrat”, utterly
begs to be mocked without reservation or mercy, a reactionary has to
admit that it is a plain and accurate description of a disaster in
progress. For all the problems that the establishment‛s rule has
produced, giving more power to the voters isn’t really a solution. It
might produce short-term benefit by curbing the current fiscal
insanity, but what next, once the voters realise they can genuinely
make demands of the government? What happens to all the rest of the
empty rituals of a two-party system, if enemies of the establishment
really control a party? The democratic institutions are not robust
enough to handle actual conflict. They depend in every case on
“gentlemanly” cooperation between the parties, and would crumble under
the pressure, as they do when installed in countries without a local
Cathedral to run them.

The system can fail in two ways: the voters could actually take
power, or they could learn that they cannot take power. Either way,
the sole virtue of democracy — that it pacifies the mob with the
illusion of power — will be lost. Some of the establishment are
realising that:Democracy After the Shutdown

It’s by no means a likely outcome, but the dropping of the pretence of
democracy could be the way out. Certainly not in the form of King
Barack I, but it is conceivable that the Democratic Party and the
moderate rump of the Republicans could merge into a kind of “Committee
of National Unity” (for the duration of the emergency, natch) that
would eliminate Tea Party votes through some procedural mechanism,
rule unopposed and evolve into something like the modern Chinese
Communist Party.

The one-party state is not an ideal form of reactionary government,
but if we allow the claim that fake-democracy was one of the more
successful governing structures of the twentieth century, then by the
same standard the Chinese model is about the best of a bad lot for the
twenty-first. There is always the possibility of it developing further
into some kind of monarchy.

I think that is a terrible mistake. The British, of course, were going
through the process of abandoning the separation of legislature and
executive while the US constitution was written — Queen Anne appointed
Tory Ministers in spite of Whig Parliaments, but by the 1830s this was
recognised to be unworkable, and any Prime Minister who could not win
a vote of confidence would resign. The legislature owned the
executive.

Against this, @Outsideness points out, reasonably, that the USA has
not been the worst-governed nation over the last couple of centuries,
so mere association with the treasonous blackguards of 1776 is not
quite sufficient to dispose of the idea of separating tax-raising and
policy into different bodies. If it is such a bad idea, how did the US
manage with it up until 2012?

One way is that, because both the House of Representatives and
President have both been elected by the same electorate, they have
tended to be mostly in step. The periods of “gridlock” when they have
been in opposition have generally been recognised as temporary, so the
limits of the powers of each side were not fully tested, both sides
assuming that a period of united government would follow at some
point. (It’s interesting that the concept of “gridlock” has
disappeared from the lexicon over the last six months — it is
something that can only happen to white presidents, not to The Holy
One. The disappearance of gridlock is one of the reasons I take the
current process to be a permanent shift in constitutional
arrangements).

Another has been the unusually legalistic attitude of Americans: more
than any Europeans, including British, they tend to accept that
something should be done just because it is the rule, whether or not
it iseems like a good idea. Presidents before Obama accepted that
they could not do much — certainly not anything very expensive —
against the will of Congress. The “balance of power” between the
executive and legislature could last as long as it was not tested.

The other reason why separation of powers worked longer in the US than
in Britain is that the US government was not always the government of
the US. In the division between the States and the Federal government,
the “Keep the lights on” functions were predominantly State concerns,
until the mid-20th Century.

The idea of assembling a government from independent self-perpetuating
institutions is not one I would dismiss out of hand. There are strong
echoes of the role of the medieval Church. But dividing the taxing
institution from the domestic policy-making institution is either a
sham or a shortcut to civil war.

Where, then, did it come from? My assumption has always been that the
origin of the House of Commons is that it embodied the people whose
active cooperation was needed in order to practically gather taxes in
11th to 16th Century England. The King ran his tax demands through
them because if they, out in the country, chose to be obstructive
about assessing and gathering the tax, he simply wasn’t going to get
any. The small to medium landowners handed over their portions to the
Royal Treasury without a fight because they knew that everyone else
was paying on the same basis, and they weren’t just being landed on
and raided, which is what it would look like if the King raised taxes
without going through any kind of collective.

By the time of King Charles the Martyr, it was no longer clear that
this was the case, and so Parliament’s control over taxation had gone
from being a practical physical power to being a constitutional
entitlement. As such, it could be lost and needed to be fought for.

Since the ensuing fight was, by my measure, where progressivism first
started to obtain power in the world — to become a party rather than
an occasional aspiration, I strongly suspect that the separation of
powers of taxation and executive is the worst idea in the world.

It’s not the role of the neoreaction to get too occupied by current
affairs. The day-to-day obsessions of domestic and foreign policy are
mostly irrelevant to our concerns; we must set our sights on a larger
scale and a longer term.

The US Government shutdown, however, is a somewhat larger event, in
which the actual forces shaping events ought to show themselves, and
which we must be able to account for as a test and a demonstration of
our theories.

I have not seen such an account, except for James Donald’stightly constructed argument
that, on the part of the Republican Congressional leaders at least,
the conflict is a sham.

Even accepting Jim’s thesis, the wider story still needs explaining
and putting into context.

There is a kind of dynamic equilibrium of politics under the Modern
Structure. The Cathedral moves left at a controlled pace. It drags the
political establishment behind it. The parties and the media drag the
backward mass of the people behind them.

The last 15 years, under the Bush and Obama administrations, have seen
an increase in the rate of expansion of the economic activity of the
Federal Government beyond the previous rate. We can think of the old
rate of leftward drift as the equilibrium rate, though of course that’s
oversimplifying a complex situation.

That departure from the equilibrium rate of advance produced the Tea
Party, by damaging the illusion that flyover country could oppose what
was happening simply by supporting the Republican side of the
political class.

The belief of the political classes in Washington today, received from
the Cathedral, is that the White House is the government, and the
House of Representatives is somewhere between a historical curiosity
and a large lobbying firm. The motive for this is that the Presidency
is easier for the Cathedral to control (particularly when it is in the
hands of a leftist of weak character).

Leading Republicans, accepting the Cathedral position that the
President is allowed to make domestic policy, but with their lucrative
jobs threatened by the Tea Party, are adopting the fake-aggressive
position described by James Donald.

Once they lose, the right of the Presidency to rule alone will be
established. Congress will be a dead letter.

It is still just possible that the Cathedral could attempt to revive
Congress at some later time if they need to restrain an uncooperative
president. But I would consider that unlikely — for a start, there’s
no indication where an uncooperative president would come from.

The change in the constitutional roles of Congress and the Presidency
that we are looking at the middle of is a prime illustration of the
way the Modern Structure achieves major advances. There is plenty of
noise, but no meaningful debate: the case for the new constitution
consists primarily of shocked outrage that anyone could consider
retaining the old one.

From a European perspective, it looks most like the situation when a
new Treaty extends the powers of the European Union. In those cases at
least there is a debate at the time, but once it is accepted, it is
done for ever, and can no longer be considered negotiable. If a
country like Denmark or Ireland votes down a change, then there is a
much-resented delay while a new vote is arranged, and then finally the
new consititution can be considered finished. It is then beyond any
challenge. To suggest in France at any time since 1993 that the
Maastricht treaty be rolled back would be utterly extremist, though it
passed in a referendum by a vote of 51% to 49%, and Denmark needed two
attempts to get the right answer.

From the American standpoint, it more concretely resembles the
McCarthy period. McCarthy believed that the permanent US government
was following a foreign policy at odds with that publicy avowed by the
elected government, and that that was a crime. The facts and the law
were on his side, but the Cathedral wasn’t, and his defeat meant that
the question was settled: elected bodies no longer had any claim to
control the State Department. The current conflict is about taking the
power to control the Federal Government’s spending policy out of the
hands of the elected body.

(Correction: according toCongressman Devin Nunes,
the president does not have the power to spend as much as he wants on
whatever he wants — he can be stopped if a supermajority in both
houses of Congress opposes him. So that’s all right then.)

None of this makes much difference in the long run. It is not as if
Congress was ever a serious constraint on the steady march towards
communism. I just think that it’s a big enough change in the system’s
own terms to require an explanation.

Konkvistador brought upKingdom 2037
on twitter yesterday, and elicited a few comments.

@admittedlyhuman was turned off by the idea of criticism of the King
being illegal. I would refer her to, for instance, the recent article
at Theden onGeorgia’s Rose Revolution,
or to my thinking onBo Xilal. The
state has to protect itself against revolutionaries, and has to do so
efficiently enough to not turn into a police state. The most efficient
method is not to wait for enemies to build a mass movement and then
take the mass movement on in a fair fight — it’s to make the existence
of such a mass movement unthinkable so nobody ever starts it.

That doesn’t mean that the most efficient way is to listen into
everyone’s private conversations and drag Fred Bloggs in front of the
Star Chamber because he said the King has a big nose. I’m not talking
about going the full Thai, nor about prohibiting discussion of the
merits of alternative policies. It is only the position of the King
that is beyond criticism.

That was the only criticism made which I reject outright.

Mike Anissimov and C-LAR noted that a total tax level of 25% was high,
since medieval monarchies ran at around 10%. 10% is a good target for
the running costs of the state. But medieval monarchies often ran
deficits, which had a destabilising effect. They also started out (at
least in England) with very large landholdings, which were gradually
depleted. A King in 2037 needs to be accumulating assets, not
exhausting them. A new landed aristocracy has to be built, and that
will not come cheap. In the very long run, I would expect taxation to
fall to close to zero, and the administration to be funded from the
profit on the royal estates, since even low levels of taxation will
cost more in terms of impairment of asset values than they bring in in
revenue, but in the medium term those estates have to be built up,
stability has to be bought, and 25% is still a good deal less than
modern people are used to.

I mentioned on twitter that the King has to compete for allies with
revolutionaries who can promise to tax at 50% and deliver the profits
to their supporters. The whole point of advocating monarchy as an
ideal is that he does not have to compete on equal terms, but he still
needs to be a strong figure, and a 17th-century beggar-king borrowing
to pay his tailor’s bill is not a strong figure.

C-LAR was also concerned about immigration, and the adverse effect on
“the proles”. Again, this is a legitimate worry, addressed in thecommentary article. The
phrase “not tightly restricted” is perhaps misleading: I never
imagined open borders or unlimited immigration; that undesirables will
be kept out goes without saying.

However, I think that even quite high levels of immigration can be
beneficial provided that cultural integration is expected, and the
immigrants do not become a politically significant bloc. The idea of
an income tax specifically on foreigners (it may not be clear from the
original article that I do not expect ordinary people to be paying
income tax) is for symbolism as well as revenue: immigrants are
permitted to live in the country, they are not entitled to live in the
country. I pointed on twitter to my later article onAntidisestablishmentarianism,
which is another example of the idea that the majority native culture
is openly and concretely privileged over foreign and minority
cultures.

In the end, immigration is a practical question, not a matter of
principle. If it causes more trouble than it’s worth, cut it down.

Added: Further discussions on Twitter

Before addressing the tax situation, I need to make something explicit
that should be obvious but hasn’t been mentioned: the level of tax is
entirely up to the King. There is no “man behind the curtain” forcing
a 25% limit on him: the only reason for him to moderate his demands is
the fact of the long-term value of the country to him being higher if
its economy is allowed to flourish, and of high taxes restricting that
flourishing. If he believes that the economy will benefit from
massive state investment projects funded by a 40%-50% tax level, that
is what he will do. I think that would be a mistake, but there’s
nothing to prevent it. The whole point of the system of government
I’m sketching out here is to make the sovereign as safe from rebellion
as possible; it would be dishonest for me to try to say, “obviously
nobody would tolerate a 30% income tax, the King would be removed
immediately”.

Anyway, @DocCLAR was very interested in the details of taxation. As
discussed above, I’m suggesting a level of taxation around midway
between what we have now and what is actually necessary to run the
state. I don’t have very strong views on the actual manner of
taxation, but the main considerations are the distorting economic
effects of the tax, and the cost of administering and enforcing it. I
had suggested Land Value Tax plus an assortment of duties and tariffs
on specific goods, plus the income tax on foreigners. The thinking
behind that is that LVT is relatively non-distorting, and maintaining
information on the ownership and estimated value of land, while not
free, is something that is reasonable and useful for the government to
do anyway. I dislike general income taxes and sales or value added
taxes, because they need the government to check the value of
everyone’s day-to-day business in order to assess, which is both
expensive and intrusive.

The reason for putting more weight on the administrative cost of
taxation than on the economic impact is that the economic impact can
be reduced by reducing the tax level, whereas heavily administrative
taxes create a de facto tax floor by needing to collect an amount
justifying the existence of an organisation of the size necessary to
administer it. So while a general sales tax would be less economically
distorting than, say, a fuel tax, it would require a much larger
bureaucracy to collect.

Again, the reason for suggesting a (by reactionary standards) high
level of immigration is that rich immigrants attracted by efficiency
and stability can be a source of state revenue that doesn’t require
the government to interfere economically with the mass of the
population.

Tariffs are another easy-to-adminster source of revenue, but would
interfere with the idea of England recovering its position as a world
trading hub. I don’t completely rule tariffs out, depending on
circumstances.

I’m more concerned with these governing principles than with the
details of tax policy, which is not my area of expertise. Any
questions anyone has about the mechanisms, advantages, and alleged
drawbacks of LVT can probably be answered by searching onMark Wadsworth’s blog.

It turned out @DocCLAR was largely concerned with the tax question in
the context of central versus local government. For England I don’t
think the question arises — England has been ruled as a single tax
jurisdiction for almost a thousand years, give or take the farcical
failed experiment of local councils over the last century. I’m taking
on plenty in drawing up a blueprint for my own country; there are
enough American neoreactionaries to do the equivalent work for theirs.

There is, of course, the possibility of the United Kingdom surviving
in some form into the neoreactionary era. I don’t really see any
practical mechanism of real devolved power; following the logic of the
Act of Union, Wales and Scotland would be under the full authority of
the King, though his rule in Scotland might well be adapted to
Scotland’s different traditions. An alternative of an independent but
friendly Scotland would be perfectly workable. A hostile Scotland
working with the International Community to Restore Democracy to
England, on the other hand, would be a probably-fatal problem; I don’t
think a 2037 regime could survive the internal conflict that war with
Scotland would produce.

It seems a little unlikely that after any large upheaval the English
King would continue to rule Northern Ireland. There are conceivable
circumstances, on the other hand, where the British Isles become
reunited. Ireland, though, like the USA, cannot easily present
monarchy — still less an English monarchy — as a return to the
nation’s traditions, so that’s also a problematic contingency.